Category: Stories from SBJ/SBD

Here’s the latest look at my 30-day rolling list of the most read stories across our websites. There’s no change at the top spot, but there are five new stories on the list this week. You can see the last list here.

As I mentioned in the last list, we’ve learned that our readers are particularly interested in stories about ESPN. This week, the top four stories are about the network, as are six of the overall top 10.

There are five new stories on the list this week.

1) ESPN To Cut About 100 Employees; Layoffs To Be Made Public TodayChange: Same positionNotes: Still No. 1 by a large margin, this is the short story written by Media Writer John Ourand in Morning Buzz on the day that ESPN began trimming its on-air staff. It didn’t list the names of the people being fired, but did tell which executives at the network were making the difficult phone calls, and included excerpts from the memo sent to all staff by ESPN President John Skipper.Where it appeared: SportsBusiness Daily – 4/26/2017

We regularly open a few stories to the public – meaning that you don’t have to be a subscriber to read them – and the headline for those stories frequently contains the letters ‘ESPN’. Over the years we’ve learned that a lot of our readers are interested in the goings-on at the network.

I keep a running 30-day tally of the most popular stories across our websites, and the top story on the list today, with almost three times the traffic of the second story, was on ESPN getting ready to cut about 100 employees. All told, ESPN was in the headline of three of the top 10, and you could argue that it was an influential part of two other stories that related to online streaming of sports and cord cutting.

Other notes on the list: six of the 10 stories are about media, three of the headlines include the NFL, and the first item on the list that isn’t about either of those things is a link to our landing page for profiles of the 2017 Forty Under 40.

In previous years, the Forty Under 40 page would have had a lot more traffic, but this year we kept the list behind our pay wall until last Friday, the day after our annual Forty Under 40 banquet. That affected traffic, but we believe our most exclusive content should be offered first to the people who pay our bills.

Here’s the list of the stories that have led our traffic in the last 30 days: